Robert Louis Stephenson

G.K. Chesterton

[The following excerpt from The Victorian Age in Literature is based on Project Gutenberg's EBook #18639, which Karina Aleksandrova, Juliet Sutherland and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
produced.George P. Landow formatted the text and added links to other material in the Victorian Web. The decorative initial comes from Thackeray's Vanity Fair.]

o man ever wrote as well as Stevenson who
cared only about writing. Yet there is a sense, though a misleading one,
in which his original inspirations were artistic rather than purely
philosophical. To put the point in that curt covenanting way which he
himself could sometimes command, he thought it immoral to neglect
romance. The whole of his real position was expressed in that phrase of
one of his letters "our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business:
it drops so much out of a man." On the whole he concluded that what had
been dropped out of the man was the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoe
would have fled from them; and summed up his simplest emotions in that
touching cri de coeur "shall we never shed blood?" He did for the
penny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad. He proved
that, because it was really human, it could really rise as near to
heaven as human nature could take it. If Thackeray is our youth,
Stevenson is our boyhood: and though this is not the most artistic
thing in him, it is the most important thing in the history of Victorian
art. All the other fine things he did were, for curious reasons, remote
from the current of his age. For instance, he had the good as well as
the bad of coming from a Scotch Calvinist's house. No man in that age
had so healthy an instinct for the actuality of positive evil. In The
Master of Ballantrae he did prove with a pen of steel, that the Devil
is a gentleman — but is none the less the Devil. It is also
characteristic of him (and of the revolt from Victorian respectability
in general) that his most blood-and-thunder sensational tale is also
that which contains his most intimate and bitter truth. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that
belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry
James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that
while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one
Englishman has seen the joke — I mean the point. You will find twenty
allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will also
find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal,
neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means
that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab
of the story is that man can't: because while evil does not care for
good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape
from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience.
This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also
good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good
story-telling.

If the rather vague Victorian public did not appreciate the deep and
even tragic ethics with which Stevenson was concerned, still less were
they of a sort to appreciate the French finish and fastidiousness of his
style; in which he seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his
pen, like a man playing spillikins. But that style also had a quality
that could be felt; it had a military edge to it, an acies; and there
was a kind of swordsmanship about it. Thus all the circumstances led,
not so much to the narrowing of Stevenson to the romance of the fighting
spirit; but the narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had a
great many other things to say; but this was what we were willing to
hear: a reaction against the gross contempt for soldiering which had
really given a certain Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet another
circumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not wholly
fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases the
credit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnacious
optimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with the actualities
of sport, war, or comradeship: and here and there his note is false in
these matters, and reminds one (though very remotely) of the mere
provincial bully that Henley sometimes sank to be.

For Stevenson had at his elbow a friend, an invalid like himself, a man
of courage and stoicism like himself; but a man in whom everything that
Stevenson made delicate and rational became unbalanced and blind. The
difference is, moreover, that Stevenson was quite right in claiming that
he could treat his limitation as an accident; that his medicines "did
not colour his life." His life was really coloured out of a shillingk
paint-box, like his toy-theatre: such high spirits as he had are the key
to him: his sufferings are not the key to him. But Henley's sufferings
are the key to Henley; much must be excused him, and there is much to be
excused. The result was that while there was always a certain dainty
equity about Stevenson's judgments, even when he was wrong, Henley
seemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better.
There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandable
when surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotions
mellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the new
fashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of the
Christian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment did not
spread widely until the note was struck outside England in one of the
conquered countries; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short stories showed
the stamp of the thing called genius; that indefinable, dangerous and
often temporary thing.